Chapter 22: How to Drown a Walking Explosion
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If you've never seen a warship explode from the sky, let me tell you—it's kind of like watching a birthday cake catch fire, flip over, and punch the ocean.
Team Kurenai had front row seats.
"Target locked," Hinata whispered, her voice steady but her eyes blazing. Lightning laced her chakra bow like it was forged by Zeus and supercharged by Thor.
"Ready to fire," Tenten said, bracing her armored boots on a floating disc of chakra. Her cannon spun up with a whine that promised bad decisions for anyone on the receiving end.
Kankuro gave a nod as his Dragon King puppet deployed behind him. Its twin chakra cannons swiveled forward, red lights glowing like the eyes of a very angry deity.
Kurenai raised both hands. Her genjutsu shimmered into place like a curtain of starlight, wrapping them in a bubble of unreality. To the world below, they didn't exist.
"One shot," Kurenai said softly. "Make it count."
"Let's make this pineapple pop," Tenten added with a smirk.
Hinata released her arrow.
It howled through the air, a streak of white-hot vengeance. Tenten's cannon roared a moment later, followed by the twin blasts from the Dragon King. The sky split. The ocean shuddered.
KA-BOOOOM.
The Dressrosan battleship exploded like it had a death wish and a fireworks fetish. A blast of light and heat tore upward, shredding the ship into chunks of burning debris.
Hinata watched with her Byakugan.
"Ship destroyed. Gladius survived."
Of course he did.
From the wreckage, Gladius launched upward like a bottle rocket having a bad day. His coat flapped wildly, and his mouth was doing a great impression of a volcano screaming at the moon.
"I KNOW YOU'RE OUT HERE!" he bellowed, eyes darting around the empty sky. "SHOW YOURSELVES, YOU COWARDS!"
He couldn't see them. That was the genius of Kurenai's genjutsu.
But Gladius was not the type to quietly accept being blindfolded. No, he did what any mentally unstable bomber in a frilly shirt would do—he started blowing up everything.
"RUPTURE BULLETS!"
BANG!
BANG-BANG-BANG!
Tiny glowing orbs shot from his fingers like deadly marbles. They detonated midair, cracking space like eggshells and sending shockwaves in every direction.
"Stay still," Kurenai warned. "Don't move unless absolutely necessary. He's firing blind."
Tenten tensed as one of the rupture spheres passed within meters.
"He's just guessing now," she muttered.
"No," Hinata said, eyes narrowing. "He's triangulating."
The others looked at her.
"He's targeting where the attacks could have come from. If he fires enough... eventually, he'll hit us."
Kankuro let out a long breath. "Okay, so the pineapple has some brain cells."
Below them, Gladius hovered midair, breathing heavily. His hands twitched, the veins on his face bulging like they were trying to escape.
"I'll blow this whole sky apart if I have to!"
And then—he fired again.
Five rupture bullets screamed through the air, this time closer to their position.
One exploded barely ten feet from Tenten, sending a shockwave that knocked her back.
"I'M HIT—wait, no, just wind. I'm good!" she shouted, catching herself midair.
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If there was one universal truth among ninja, it was this: honor was optional. Winning was mandatory.
And Gladius? He was about to learn that the hard way.
"Split up," Kurenai whispered through the comms. "Don't let him get a read on your pattern. He's fast, but he's not a strategist."
Gladius flew through the smoke cloud of his own exploded battleship, cape trailing like an angry bat, his grin wide and deranged.
"Oh come on!" he roared. "Hiding again?! What is this, tag with cowards?"
Kankuro's Dragon King puppet answered with a BRRRMMM of cannon fire. Twin chakra bombs spiraled toward Gladius like angry fireworks.
"Don't worry," Kankuro said, "we're playing tag, all right. You're it."
The sky bloomed with fire.
Gladius darted through the explosions, his body glowing blue as it pulsed and swelled like a balloon about to burst.
"You want explosions? I AM EXPLOSIONS!"
He extended his arms. The air shimmered.
BOOM!
Two nearby clouds ruptured into shrapnel-filled shockwaves. Shreds of wind and debris flew everywhere—but Kurenai's genjutsu was still up. They moved like phantoms. Unseen. Unstoppable.
"I've seen firecrackers with more subtlety," Tenten muttered, flying upside down as her chakra chains twisted through the air like metallic snakes. "Hey, Gladius! Bet you can't rupture this!"
The chains snapped toward him. Gladius narrowly dodged, twisting midair in a corkscrew and grabbing a chunk of broken ship wreckage. His hand pulsed.
"Let's pop the party!"
He hurled the wood like a javelin—and it ruptured mid-flight, sending splinters flying in all directions.
Hinata dodged a chunk of ship-murder with a graceful spin, drawing her bow again. Lightning danced around her fingertips as she pulled back the next arrow.
"Let's try this again," she said, voice like the calm before the storm.
TWANG!
The arrow shot forward like a comet wrapped in thunder.
Gladius saw it—barely—and deflected with an arm that expanded like an inflatable shield, absorbing the electric blast before it popped and shrunk.
"Nice trick," he snarled, singed and smoking. "You know what I hate more than birds? Birds that shoot lightning."
Meanwhile, Ino smiled darkly. "Let's see how well your lungs like this."
She flung a handful of kunai shaped like delicate purple flowers. They shimmered in the light, trailing a sweet, almost intoxicating aroma.
Gladius twisted again, dodging them with an angry snarl. "You think perfume's gonna stop me?!"
"No," Ino said. "But breathing it in for more than ten seconds will make your knees jelly. Even Naruto's, if he let it sit long enough."
Gladius coughed. Once. Twice. "Wh... what did you..."
"Oh look," Kurenai's voice echoed in his head, soft and cold. "Someone's finally listening."
Gladius's vision blurred. His body swelled slightly without meaning to, destabilizing his balance. A chakra chain grazed his leg and latched on.
"Oh— no no no no—"
CLANK.
The other end of the chain slammed into another, wrapping him midair like a net tightening around a rocket.
"Got him!" Tenten shouted.
"Don't celebrate yet!" Kankuro warned.
Because Gladius, foaming at the mouth and flushed red with rage, started laughing.
"You think you've got me?! I rupture my own bones for breakfast!!"
His torso began expanding—his shoulders ballooned, neck thickened, veins pulsing like wires about to snap.
Hinata's eyes widened.
"Kurenai!" she warned. "He's going full detonation—!"
"Brace!" Kurenai shouted. "NOW!"
BOOOOOOM.
A midair supernova exploded in all directions. Shrapnel, fire, shockwaves—everything went white.
The chakra chains were obliterated. Gladius fell, spinning wildly, steam rising off his skin like a teakettle gone berserk.
"STILL ALIVE!" he screamed, tumbling through the air like an angry meteor. "YOU HAVEN'T SEEN—"
WHACK.
A chakra bomb from the Dragon King slammed into him from below and detonated mid-sentence.
Gladius pinwheeled through the sky, coughing, eyes wide with fury, bleeding from his forehead—but still conscious.
"Not... fair..." he growled, gripping the air like it owed him money.
"Nope," Kankuro said, reloading his puppet's cannons. "Welcome to ninja warfare. No refunds."
Gladius hovered again, breathing hard. The poison was slowing him down. The attacks were relentless. The ninja were invisible. And worst of all?
They weren't giving him time to monologue.
"This isn't over!" he roared.
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From far above the battle, Naruto's sage clone floated effortlessly in the sky, eyes closed, hair flickering in the wind. If you didn't know better, you'd think he was meditating or dozing off midair. In reality, his eyes behind the lids were glowing amber with Sage Mode, and he was watching every flicker of motion from the battlefield below like a hawk on caffeine.
"That's right," he muttered. "Don't die, and don't call me unless someone's missing a limb."
Every team had a sage clone monitoring them. That wasn't arrogance. That was experience. This region was dangerous—like "you might step on a flower and get eaten by a mountain" kind of dangerous—and Naruto had long stopped trusting luck when it came to the safety of his people.
Right now, his eyes were fixed on one particular angry pineapple.
Gladius.
The guy was a walking firework factory with anger issues. Fast, volatile, and strong enough to blast a hole in a warship with his bare fists. Naruto could tell—sensing him through Sage Mode—that individually, none of his ninja could beat Gladius alone.
But together?
Well, that was a different story.
Gladius couldn't see them. Not really. Kurenai's genjutsu made sure of that. The air shimmered strangely around him, and every time he thought he saw a flicker—a shadow, a flash of chakra—it vanished the moment he struck.
"Cowards!" he yelled, bounding through the air like a man on invisible stairs. "Come out and fight!"
Another lightning arrow zipped past his shoulder. He swatted at it, missed, and it exploded behind him like a thunderclap.
"Tch," he spat, body glowing slightly with pent-up pressure. "Fine. Let's light this sky up like a festival!"
He slammed both palms together.
His arms bulged grotesquely, his chest swelled like a balloon full of TNT, and his legs doubled in size. Energy pulsed off of him in waves. Every molecule in the air screamed incoming.
He roared, his voice echoing across the clouds.
"BOOOM—"
But the blast never came.
Because that's when the Dragon King puppet zoomed out of the smoke like a charging bull, spinning midair with its cannons lit up. Just behind it, the Sasori puppet moved in like a graceful predator, kunai arms gleaming.
Gladius paused—eyes narrowing. Targets!
He snapped forward, hands glowing, ready to rupture them into dust—
Then everything slowed.
A presence slipped into his mind.
What—?
He tried to move his hand—and couldn't.
"Oh no," a new voice echoed inside his skull, soft, smug, and female. "You're not touching anything right now."
Ino Yamanaka.
She floated behind him, her eyes glowing with focus, her hands still held in the familiar Mind Body Switch Jutsu seal. She had hidden in the blind spots of his attacks, approached while he was distracted by the puppets, and invaded his mind.
And it worked.
Because Gladius—exploding time bomb or not—had no resistance to mental jutsu. Zero. Nada. Apparently, no one had ever tried it before. Probably because most people preferred not to mentally visit whatever was happening in Gladius's brain.
"Well that's… messy," Ino muttered, sweat forming on her brow as she moved his body like a puppet. "Okay, I'm in, but this guy's psyche is like a warzone inside a bouncy castle."
"Hold him steady," Kurenai said through the comms, her voice cool and commanding.
And then she struck.
With a whisper of chakra, she sent Gladius spiraling into a world of illusion. One moment, he was flying midair. The next—
He was on a sunny deck, a chilled drink in his hand, and a seagull pooping on a flag that read "Now Departing to Alabasta."
"…Wait," Gladius muttered in the genjutsu world, looking around. "Wasn't I…"
Nope. No battle. No enemies. Just a vacation. Kurenai had layered the illusion perfectly, like an origami trap of the mind.
Outside the illusion, the ninja held position.
They floated in the air with chakra wings fanning behind them—elegant, lethal, and deadly quiet.
Tenten kept her chakra rifle trained on Gladius's limp body. "You guys sure he's out? 'Cause I've got a chakra grenade with his name on it."
Ino winced, holding the jutsu. "He's asleep. Mentally surfing. If he wakes up, he's yours."
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Gladius wasn't moving.
He floated in the air like a puppet whose strings had been cut, still trapped in Kurenai's genjutsu, still under Ino's mental leash. A literal flying bomb—and now completely harmless.
For a second, nobody spoke.
The clouds drifted. Tenten cracked her neck. Hinata hovered silently, bow still in hand. Kankuro's puppet whirred in place, smoke trailing from its cannons.
Then Tenten grinned. "Time to put this pineapple in a can."
She flicked her scroll open and bam!, a cylindrical container the size of a two-story house popped into existence with a puff of chakra smoke. The outer shell gleamed silver with sealing marks etched like vines, twisting up to the lid like tattoos. She made a hand seal, and the bottom half detached with a heavy thunk.
"Ino, Kurenai, keep him still!" she shouted.
"On it," Ino said, gritting her teeth. Her chakra was stretched thin, but Gladius hadn't figured out he was a prisoner in his own head yet.
Kurenai flew closer, hands swirling with red-tinted chakra. "We'll hold. Just don't miss."
Tenten gave her a thumbs up and called to Kankuro. "You got the sea water?"
"Of course I've got the sea water," Kankuro said like it was the dumbest question in the world. He tapped the side of the Dragon King puppet, which opened its side compartments. Pipes unspooled from its torso, slithering down like metal snakes toward the sea below.
A moment later—
WHOOSH!
Seawater burst up from below like a geyser, pulled by a massive suction seal Tenten had activated earlier.
The container filled rapidly, swirling and churning like a blender without a lid.
Tenten gave a sharp nod. "Good. Get him in."
Hinata gently propelled Gladius's limp body into the water with a pulse of wind from her wings. He dropped like a stone and splashed into the container. The moment his body hit seawater—
THUNK.
He went completely limp.
No glowing arms. No swelling body. No exploding limbs. Just a very soggy, unconscious man in a trench coat who looked like he'd been caught in the middle of a really bad bath.
"Sea water neutralizes Devil Fruit users," Hinata confirmed, floating just above the rim. "He won't be able to use his powers unless we pull him out."
"Perfect," said Tenten, sealing the container shut with a clap and a glowing array of kanji. A second later, the entire tank shrank down to a briefcase-sized scroll, which she slung over her shoulder.
"Mission complete," she declared.
Ino sagged slightly, breathing hard but smiling. "I'm never going in that guy's mind again. It's like being locked in a rave party run by landmines."
Kurenai smirked. "And yet you handled it beautifully."
"I'll accept bribes in the form of chocolate mochi," Ino muttered.
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You ever see a guy try to act tough while floating in a giant fish tank?
Yeah, me neither. Until today.
There we were—deep underground, in a secret desert bunker that Gaara made out of sand like it was a LEGO set. The guy probably thinks interior decorating means sculpting staircases with chakra. Anyway, picture this: soft chakra lights glowing, sandstone walls curved like a dome, and in the middle of it all...
One very angry pirate bobbing up and down in a tank of saltwater like the world's grumpiest koi.
His name's Gladius. Explosion powers. Wears a coat that makes him look like an angry punk-rock porcupine. A few hours ago, he tried to blast my entire squad into the sky.
Now? He looked like he was auditioning for the villain role in Finding Nemo.
"Can he hear us in there?" Kiba asked, poking the glass like a curious kindergartner. I was 95% sure he was resisting the urge to draw a mustache on it.
"He can," Kurenai-sensei said, not even looking up. "And yes, he's annoyed. Try harder."
Honestly, I'd never seen the gang like this before. Kakashi-sensei was leaning against the wall looking cool and mysterious as always. Sakura stood with her arms crossed, glaring like Gladius owed her lunch money. Ino and Kurenai were tag-teaming his brain, and I gotta say—it was really weird watching a guy confess government secrets while floating in saltwater.
Oh, right—the fish tank? That was Tenten's idea. She summoned a giant glass container and filled it with seawater from a scroll like it was no big deal.
"Devil Fruit powers don't work in seawater," she said with a shrug, like she hadn't just casually nerfed a human grenade.
So now we had a pirate popsicle. A soggy one.
"Start talking," Kakashi said, eye lazily open. "Doflamingo. What's his deal?"
Now, you'd expect Gladius to scream something about vengeance or honor or explosions, but instead, he said:
"Doflamingo is the greatest warlord alive. His suits are stitched from the dreams of cowards. His sunglasses contain the tears of justice. He once killed a man by smiling too hard."
Everyone kind of just… stared at him.
"Is… that a real thing?" Sakura asked.
"Nope," Kurenai said, adjusting the genjutsu like she was tuning a TV channel. "He's being dramatic."
"Focus," Kakashi said. "Drop the poetry."
Then Gladius, still soaking and twitching like a wet cat, started talking for real.
"Paramecia-type. Ito Ito no Mi. Controls strings. Invisible threads, razor-sharp. Can control people like puppets. Can fly. Dangerous, manipulative, always smiling like he knows something you don't."
Now that sounded more like a warlord.
He went on to list Doflamingo's crew. And let me tell you—these people were the opposite of friendly:
Trebol: giant sticky man. Slime. Explosions. Basically a walking booger bomb.
Diamante: folds steel like paper. Dresses like a matador who lost a bet.
Pica: controls stone. Not like, "Oh cool, I can make a wall." No. Like, "I am the wall, and now it's punching you."
Shikamaru was scribbling notes like his life depended on it, which, knowing him, meant he'd already planned five ways to trap them using shadows and dental floss.
Meanwhile, Ino and Kurenai started messing with Gladius.
First, they made him think he was in the middle of a wedding ceremony.
"To the honorable Mr. Gladius and the Sea," Gai-sensei announced, because of course he was into it.
Confetti fell. Gaara made a little sand bowtie appear on Gladius's head. Everyone clapped.
He thrashed in the tank. "I will DESTROY ALL OF YOU!"
Kiba gave him a thumbs-up. "Congratulations on the honeymoon!"
Even Kakashi cracked a smile. I think. It's hard to tell under that mask.
But all jokes aside, this was important.
Every word Gladius said gave us a better shot at surviving whatever Doflamingo threw at us. Because if there's one thing ninja are good at (besides sneak attacks and eating way too much ramen), it's planning ahead.
We don't charge into battle unless we know exactly where to stab, where to trap, and which poor sucker is getting shadow possessed by Shikamaru first.
I didn't even speak much the whole time. I just watched.
Not because I had nothing to say—but because I was learning.
Victory wasn't just strength.
It was strategy.
It was teamwork.
And sometimes, it was dunking your enemy in a fish tank until he behaved.